SHERA is delighted to announce that it has received its first donation!

An anonymous donation has been made in honor of Maya Semina, an art historian from Russia, whose book about Filipp Maliavin was published by Moscow’s BooksMArt Press in 2014.

The donation will support one graduate student’s travel to any conference listed on SHERA’s News Blog. The procedure for selecting a grantee will be elaborated during a SHERA membership meeting at ASEEES in November 2016 and announced shortly thereafter.

Thank you to this generous anonymous donor!

SHERA is pleased to announce the recent publications of member and Vice President, Eva Forgacs:

“On Terminology” Umeni, (Prague) 2016/1

“Deconstructing Constructivism in Post-Communist Hungary. László Rajk and the Na-Ne Gallery”, in David Ayers and Benedikt Hjartarson, eds., Utopia. The Avant-Garde, Modernism and (Im)Possible Life, Berlin/Boston, DeGruyters, 2015

“The Bauhaus has No Place”,”Das Bauhaus hat keinen Ort”, in Bauhaus News, Stimmen zur Gegenwart, Spector Books, Berlin, Dessau, Weimar, Bauhaus Kooperation, 2015

Be sure to check out these interesting titles!

ANN: The Russian Century - The Literary, Visual, and Performing Arts, 1801–1917

Yale University, September 30 - October 1, 2016
More information coming soon - save the date!
Contact: Molly Brunson and Bella Grigoryan

SHERA is pleased to announced that member and SHERA-SAH Liaison Anna P. Sokolina will be the first Milka Bliznakov Scholar

In June 2016, the Milka Bliznakov Research Prize Jury at the International Archive of Women in Architecture IAWA, facilitated at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, created a new designation — the Milka Bliznakov Scholar – that includes a stipend to cover a two-year period. The first scholarly designation is awarded to Dr. Anna P. Sokolina in recognition and support of her research proposal “Life to Architecture: Milka Bliznakov Academic Papers and Records of Russian Women Architects at the IAWA.” The Jury concluded that the proposed research project outlines an important and timely initiative, and Anna P. Sokolina is in a unique position to realize this effort to situate Professor Emerita Milka Bliznakov’s scholarly contribution.

SHERA is pleased to announce the latest exhibitions, publications and projects from member Rosalind P. Blakesley

In 2016 Rosalind P. Blakesley curated ‘Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and advised on its partner exhibition, ‘From Elizabeth to Victoria: British Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery, London’ at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

She published ‘The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881’ (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2016), 365 pp.; and ‘Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky’ (exhibition catalogue, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2016), 176 pp.

She was also granted an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award for a PhD student to research questions of print culture, modernisation and urbanisation, using the Talbot Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford as the prime research resource.

SHERA is pleased to announce a current exhibition curated by its member Magdalena Moskalewicz, “The Travellers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe”

The exhibition looks at travel in a region where freedom to travel was, until recently, a luxury available only to the very few.. The exhibition offer a reflection by contemporary artists hailing from the region—the former Eastern Bloc and the former Yugoslavia—often first- and second-generation migrants. 23 artists from 15 countries show how people, goods, and ideas flow between this part of Europe and other regions of the world. They tell the stories of holiday trips as well as distant journeys and migrations, focusing on a period from the mid-20th century until today, from the closed borders of the divided Cold War-era Europe to the capitalism-driven acceleration of the 21st century. By exploring these travellers’ multiple viewpoints, an extraordinary gift described by Edward Said, the exhibition aims to shed light on the contemporary identity of the region, and is a direct commentary to its current socio-political situation.

The exhibitions features works of: Adéla Babanová, Daniel Baker, Olga Chernysheva, Wojciech Gilewicz, Pravdoliub Ivanov, C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska, Irina Korina, Taus Makhacheva, Porter McCray, Alban Muja, Ilona Németh & Jonathan Ravasz, Roman Ondak, Tímea Anita Oravecz, Adrian Paci, Vesna Pavlović, Dushko Petrovich, Janek Simon, Radek Szlaga & Honza Zamojski, Maja Vukoje, Sislej Xhafa

The show is on view at Zachęta–National Gallery of Art in Warsaw until Aug 21. Please find more information on the Zacheta National Gallery’s website.

SHERA is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication by Nancy Perloff, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute.

Entitled Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art, it is forthcoming in December 2016 from Getty Publications.

The Museum of Russian Icons is pleased to announce several new publications in its Journal of Icon Studies.

Fabian Heffermehl of the University of Oslo has publichsed an article entitled “The Icon and the Hand: Acheiropoeisis (Nerokotvornost’) as a Literary Technique in Shalamov’s Glove.”

Raoul Smith has written a brief report in the Occasional Papers section for in-house research of the Journal website, entitled “Observations on some lexical and paleographic features of an inscription on Icon R2007.46 ‘Mother of God, In thee rejoiceth.’”

Clemena Antonova of the Univestiy of Cologne has published two recent exhibition reviews: “A Giotto Exhibition in Milan” and “The Icon Collection at the Archaeology Museum in Nessebar, Bulgaria.”

All of these can be accessed at the Museum of Russian Icons website

ANN: Public Talk: Tracing the Afterlives of Communism in Contemporary Art from Eastern Europe / Ksenia Nouril

You are warmly invited to a public talk by SHERA Secretary and Treasurer on the artists Olga Chernysheva and Deimantas Narkevičius at the New York Public Library on Tuesday, July 12 at 6pm.

Her talk talk, “Tracing the Afterlives of Communism in Contemporary Art from Eastern Europe,” will take place in the Celeste Auditorium in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 5th Avenue at 42nd Street. All Public Library Programs are free of charge.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, how have contemporary artists from Eastern Europe borne witness to the slow but steady disappearance of communism from everyday life? In its wake, what vestiges of this ideology were left behind? How do artists mediate these traces of their communist pasts by returning to this often-fraught history in artworks that then circulate as commodities on the global art market? Ksenia Nouril will address the historical turn in the recent work of Olga Chernysheva and Deimantas Narkevičius, who are based in Moscow, Russia and Vilnius, Lithuania, respectively.

Chernysheva and Narkevičius came of age in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, a period known as perestroika or reconstruction, when political, social, and economic reforms aimed to bolster the failing project of communism after years of stagnation. Thus, in their formative years as artists, they experienced the disintegration of Soviet society. Today, through their patient but in no way passive observation of their surroundings, they capture the byproducts of communism still visibly and physically entrenched in the volatile and fragile post-Soviet socio-political ecosystem.

Nouril’s talk draws upon the writings of Svetlana Boym, Paul Ricoeur, and others, contextualizing contemporary Eastern European art with a larger discourse of studies on history, memory, and trauma.

Olga Chernysheva (b. 1962) lives and works in Moscow. She was trained in animation at the Russian State University of Cinematography in Moscow and also studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. Chernysheva represented Russia in the 2001 Venice Biennale and has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at BAK, Utrecht and Kunsthalle Erfurt, Germany. She has participated in numerous prominent group exhibitions and international biennials. More recently, her work was included in the exhibition All the Worlds’ Futures in the Arsenale at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), curated by Okwui Enwezor. In October 2016, she will have an exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York.

Deimantas Narkevičius (b. 1964) lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania. He studied sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts and was a resident at the Delfina Foundation in London from 1992 to 1993. He is one of the most consistent and widely recognized Lithuanian artists on the international art scene. He represented Lithuania at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennale Utopia Station in 2003, and in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. His work is in more than two dozen private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the French National Collection.

Ksenia Nouril is a Brooklyn-based art historian and curator. She is a Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she researches and plans programming related to Central and Eastern European art. A PhD candidate at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, she is writing her dissertation on contemporary Eastern European artists whose practices address the legacies of socialism. Her research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Graduate School-New Brunswick, and the Avenir Foundation. Previously, she worked as a Dodge Fellow at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, NJ, where she organized Dreamworlds and Catastrophes: Intersections of Art and Science in the Dodge Collection, an exhibition examining unofficial Soviet art during the Cold War. She has published in The Calvert Journal, Art Margins Online, and Inside/Out. She is an editor of and contributor to post: notes on modern and contemporary art, MoMA’s online platform for digital publishing and collaborative research on art from around the globe.

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We are delighted to announce that The St. Petersburg Arts Project is now a member of SHERA

‘St. Petersburg Arts Project’ is a New York based non-for-profit foundation, originally established in 1999 to promote cultural exchange between American and Russian art communities. For the past 17 years the foundation has successfully launched festivals and exhibitions in many cities such as London, New York, Washington, St. Petersburg and Berlin, to engage artists and audiences from the two countries in cultural exchange. In 2005, the foundation expanded its mission to multi-cultural artistic community building. The foundation continues to rely upon traditional means of communication such as publication of articles in international journals, lectures and the organization of exhibitions. Additionally, it uses and develops new media technologies to reach artists and the general public in different corners of the world.